Bern

Much like Geneva, Bern is a fairly small town (unexpected for the capitial of the country). I'm finding that it seems like most of Switzerland is covered with WiFi hotspots (it's not too hard to find a free one, thankfully). My laptop is definitely saving me a little money (at least offsetting its cost a little anyway)...

Bern has a few sights including The Ogre Fountain, which portrays a gaint fat man eating a few children... Yeah, I don't know why they'd make a statue of that... except it vaguely reminds me of a nursery rhyme, which could have been written here (if it exists) ??? The clock tower is kind of interesting too. But if you're ever in Bern, visit the bear pits. They're a couple of holes in the ground where captive bears live and seem to be constantly fed fruit from viewing tourists. The funny thing is that the bears seem to have become incredibly lazy. The tourists generally through the fruit right at them, and the bears have been pretty good at catching it in their mouths. This happens so often that they don't even get up for the fruit that isn't thrown within the catchable space but still lands within a few feet of them. These pieces become the scraps that the birds then fight over. Some fruit even lands on the bears' asses and they don't seem to care... I feel bad for them. They seem so.... human.

My guidebook said that Bern was supposed to have some good nightlife, which I was determined to check out since I missed Geneva the night before. Unfortunately, the better hostel was full when I tried to check in, forcing me to stay at the worse of the two hostel in town. It also seemed to have gotten over run with high school kids and older women running in a marathon that took place this morning. Consequently, there weren't many people who wanted to go out. I met one guy from Hong Kong who decided he'd rather sleep and a girl named Heather, who was "taking a night off" (I didn't want to take sand to the beach anyway... haha). So I ventured out on my own.

As soon as I got closer to the center of town, I started hearing music, but it didn't sound like it was muffled by a building or anything. Turns out there is a bar called Pery Bar that plays music out into Kornhaus square (or something like that), which had attracted a fairly huge crowd. And right below this there was a huge bar, Kornhauskeller, with really high ceilings and painted frescos on all the walls (similar the Raphael rooms of the Vatican but with a more yellow color). It was quite impressive, and I guess you can make a place like that when you don't have a subway.

The outdoor music cut off at midnight and moved inside Pery Bar. Most people seemed to move to the underground tables in Kornhauskeller. We went to check out another club called Liquid to see how the Swiss did things. There really wasn't anything special about the place except that, rather than play prerecorded music, they had a girl singing to the tracks being played... And this is when I realized from where these one-hit-wonder, no name, gets-stuck-in-your-head, European dance music songs comes.